his fullest recounting of the story, Hughes says that the essay he was (not) writing was on Samuel Johnson, a personality he greatly liked. Johnson and Leavis are the only two English writers habitually referred to as ‘Doctor’ (the critic George Steiner once quipped that theirs were the only two honorary doctorates conferred by the Muses). Dr Johnson and Dr Leavis were archetypes of the critical spirit, so at this moment the former was standing in for the latter: ‘I connected the fox’s command to my own ideas about Eng. Lit. and the effect of the Cambridge blend of pseudo-critical terminology and social rancour on creative spirit, and from that moment abandoned my efforts to adapt myself.’ Hughes explained that he had a considerable gift ‘for Leavis-style dismantling of texts’, indeed an almost ‘sadistic’ aptitude for it, but the procedure – surgical and objective, the antithesis of schoolmaster Fisher’s spirit of ‘husbandry and sympathetic coaching’ – seemed to him both a ‘foolish game’ and inimical to the inner life.11 The critical impulse cauterises the creative spirit.
Given his interest in folklore and comparative mythology, fostered by The White Goddess, Archaeology and Anthropology was an obvious choice for Part II of the Tripos. He was able to focus on the anthropological side. An added advantage of changing subject was that, in order to mug up his new discipline, he was encouraged to come into residence during the ‘Long Vacation term’ (an opportunity to study in Cambridge for part of the three-month summer break). This was an escape from the boredom of home. There were a demanding eight papers to prepare for. General Ethnology was an introduction to race, culture and environment, exploring different types of human economy in relation to habitat. Two papers on prehistory gave him an introduction to the archaeology of the Palaeolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic Ages, and the ‘origins of higher civilization’. Then there was Physical Anthropology: man’s zoological position in relation to the animal world, a subject of considerable interest to Hughes. Social Anthropology was less attractive to him, but it was compensated for by a special paper in Comparative Ethnography that gave him the opportunity to read such classics as Margaret Mead’s Growing up in New Guinea and Bronisław Malinowski’s Coral Gardens and their Magic. The course was rounded off with an essay on a subject of the student’s choice and a practical examination, ‘being a test of the candidate’s power of recognizing and describing bodily features and artifacts, ancient and modern, including those drawn from the culture or area specifically studied’.12 Ted enjoyed identifying bones.
Promising as the prospect of such a course seemed, he quickly grew bored with the slog of factual learning. He attended very few lectures and instead borrowed the notes of his supervision partner. Pembroke did not have an ‘Arch & Anth’ don, so he was farmed out to St John’s College, where he was supervised by Glyn Daniel, who later became a highly successful populariser of prehistory while writing Cambridge-based murder mysteries in his spare time. Ted spent most of his final year in the University Library, pursuing his own course of reading. Unlike the Bodleian in Oxford, the Cambridge UL housed most of its stock on open stacks, with an arcane classification system that led to serendipitous juxtapositions. It was perfect for browsing, for following one’s nose, for the gathering of eclectic wisdom. Ted had a lust for free-range intellectual enquiry: he told a friend that he got an erection every time he entered the library.13
For his Finals, he leaned heavily on Graves’s White Goddess, a book mistrusted by professional ethnographers, and he scraped a third-class result. Academically, he would have done better to stay with English Literature. Nevertheless, Mead’s work gave him fascinating insights into alternative views of sex, marriage, the rearing of children and the supernatural, while Malinowski’s ‘ethnographic theory of the magical word’14 could be read as an endorsement of his own attitude to the supernatural: its argument was that the magical spells of the Trobriand islanders had an essentially pragmatic function. Like all forms of language, they must be regarded as ‘verbal acts’ intended primarily not to communicate thought but to bring about practical effects. This was very much Hughes’s view of the horoscope and the Ouija board (several of his contemporaries expressed some alarm at his attempts to conjure up the spirit world). Another set text – of which he would have got the gist, even if he didn’t read it through – had the potential to contribute to his sense of modern civilisation’s damaging alienation from nature: Ian Hogbin’s Experiments in Civilization was a report on how the arrival of European culture severed a native community in the Solomon Islands from its ancient ways.
Cambridge had its own social anthropology. There were divides between the posh colleges and the more middling, between the hearties and the aesthetes, between the entitled public school crowd and the meritocratic grammar school boys. Cavalry twill and flamboyant hacking jackets were set against grey flannel trousers and tweed. Ted and his provincial friends, drinking in the Anchor, looked with a mixture of awe and scorn upon the metropolitan sophisticates who dominated the Union, the Amateur Dramatic Club and the student literary magazine Granta. Among the stars of their Cambridge were Peter Hall, future founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company and first artistic director of the National Theatre; Karl Miller, who would be literary editor of the Spectator, the New Statesman and the Listener and then found the London Review of Books; Thom Gunn of Trinity, regarded as the best student poet in Cambridge; and, most glamorous of all, Nick Tomalin, president of the Union and editor of Granta. Tomalin would marry a literary-minded Newnham College girl, Claire Delavenay, daughter of a French academic and an English composer. He became a journalist who was killed on the Golan Heights during the Yom Kippur War, she a leading biographer.
Ted published a couple of poems in Granta, hiding himself under the pseudonym Daniel Hearing. He also submitted work to new, smaller literary magazines. Peter Redgrove, something of a loner with unfashionably short hair and a leather jacket, set up delta explicitly to rival Granta. He took on Philip Hobsbaum, one of Leavis’s Downing men, as an assistant editor. Hobsbaum, who could be malicious, recalls Hughes sidling up to him in that other pub, the Mill, where the preferred beverage was strong Merrydown cider. Ted muttered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘I hear you and Redgrove are starting a poetry magazine. Here are some poems I’d like you to look at.’ With that, ‘he shuffled off to the gents’:
The wad of manuscript he had thrust at us was greasy and typed in grey characters, as though the ribbon in the typewriter had been used a great many times over a period of years, and never been changed. Redgrove looked at this dubiously, and uttered these memorable words: ‘Ted’s a nice chap, but I don’t think we ought to publish his poems.’15
After Ted had graduated, delta did publish one of these poems. Entitled ‘The Woman with Such High Heels She Looked Dangerous’, it tells of a woman slick with makeup coaxing a man into the darkness and stabbing him: ‘Men become wolves, but a wolf has become a woman.’16
The June 1954 issue of another little magazine, Chequer, appeared, in a bright yellow cover, in his final term. Daniel Huws, who had had a poem accepted there himself, was surprised to see Ted with a copy in his hands when he turned up in the Anchor one evening. Neither knew that the other wrote poetry. Ted quietly asked Dan his opinion of a poem by one Peter Crew. ‘I wrote it,’ he then explained.17 Entitled ‘Song of the Sorry Lovers’, it features a couple in bed, a hyena laughing outside and a rousing of the ‘animal faculties’.18 Later that night, Hughes and Huws went to see Redgrove, who also had a poem in Chequer. There were six bottles of German wine in his room at Queens’. They got drunk, crashed a party on another staircase and Ted got into a fight and damaged his thumb. On another occasion, he received a police caution for being drunk and disorderly after an undergraduate escapade involving a purloined road sign.
He was growing in confidence. Stories about him began circulating in college. His final-year room was on the top floor of the eastern side of Pembroke’s front court. He painted life-size pumas and what his bedmaker referred to as ‘bacchanalian